“The imaginary missile gap of the 1950s and 60s is reality today, but the moral high ground the West seemed to hold at that time is long gone, with the real axis of evil being the London-Washington-Tel Aviv triumvirate.”

By Gordon Duff and Ian Greenhalgh

March 15, 2018

While the West has been fiddling and swindling, robbing its citizens to enrich their bankers, the Russians have been busily building an unstoppable nuclear juggernaut.

The imaginary missile gap of the 1950s and 60s is reality today, but the moral high ground the West seemed to hold at that time is long gone, with the real axis of evil being the London-Washington-Tel Aviv triumvirate.

Let’s get a couple of things straight here: the evidence is now in about the American election – it was Israel and America’s own dept of Homeland Security, the shadowy, Orwellian monolith whose tendrils extend into every town and village, every precinct in America.

The recent election in Pennsylvania with Trump steel tariffs, Adelson cash and a massive smear campaign unable to stop an under-funded, inexperienced Democratic challenger tells a story. When there is a free election in America, results can be as much as 30% different.

It isn’t just that Russia hasn’t gained from Trump, but it has become increasingly clear that Trump is the puppet of an anti-Putin cabal not only intent on destroying Russia, but America as well. Without wishing to sound at all smug, we hasten to point out that VT identified Trump’s real purpose and exposed his Mafia backers months before he was elected, if only more people had listened…

Yes, one thing is clear, the New World Order is at hand; and that world order is a massive criminal conspiracy that shows its hand every day in increasingly absurd government statements, fake news and irrational policies.

For a prime example of absurd, irrational behaviour, one only has to look at the way the British government has been behaving over the issue of the poisoning of a couple of Russians, how, without any evidence whatsoever have belligerently and aggressively blamed Russia, specifically Putin and the Kremlin, using the most bellicose language and issuing threats aplenty. We suspect this has caused both amusement and anger in Moscow.

The failure to believe in the Khazarian Mafia lead to a number of wildly inaccurate historical narratives; chief among which is the simple fact that two massive world wars were engineered by a Frankfurt-based banking family, with tendrils into most of the world’s capitals and dozens of major world leaders as their bought-and-paid-for servants for two centuries.

Let’s be entirely clear, here is what we’re saying: Trump is the paid stooge of a thousand-year-old criminal organisation that originated on the steppes of southern Russia; an untold history, this bandit-nation Khazaria, nearly three quarters the size of the continental United States, terrorised both the Christian and Islamic worlds and brought east-west trade on the Silk Road to a halt. It may well have been the Khazarians that brought on the Dark Ages and the world’s first evidence of large-scale biological warfare.

Today, the Khazarian Empire survives, hidden among the world’s innocent Jewish population, an underground criminal empire of massive proportion, more powerful than governments, controlling not only the US Federal Reserve and Bank of England, but the United Nations as well.

There are no wars but the ones they create, and the armies of what was once considered the Free World or the Allies; when placed under the microscope that separates the clouds of fake historical narrative, it comes starkly into focus – all wars are their wars. War is their business, and has always been their business. Their side-businesses: narcotics, human slavery, looting the world’s economies, all fit hand-in-hand with what so many scholars have been terrorised into hiding – that the black hand of the Khazarians has pushed civilisation back centuries, stifled scientific development, enslaved continents and killed hundreds of millions.

The point where the Khazarians must be stopped and removed from power is drawing ever closer, as tensions in the Middle East reach ever higher levels, and the prospect draws ever closer of entering a second phase of the 7-year-old war – far more deadly and widespread as it draws the forces of the US, Israel, Russia and others into a conflict that could easily mushroom into World War III.

In a strange twist of fate, history appears to be repeating itself; as the two powers who finally said ‘enough’ and crushed the Khazarian Empire in the 9th century were the Russians and the Persians. Today it is Russia and Iran who stand against the Khazarian cabal, but they will have much difficulty in repeating the feat of their forebears by crushing the Khazarians.

The US threatened to invade Syria last week over its alleged chemical attacks by the Damascus government. Russia is enraged at the duplicity of Trump and the Israeli stooges that order him around like a handpuppet. Make no mistake, we are close to the brink here, as Trump and Netanyahu appear likely to ignite war with Russia at almost any moment.

Just as the Iraq War was started by the lies about mythical WMDs, this prospective Syrian war is being fueled by lies about chemical weapons. Yes, chemical weapons have been deployed against Syrian civilians; however, the culprits are not the Assad government, as claimed by Nikki Haley – rather it is the so-called ‘rebels’ who have been manufacturing and using chemical weapons against innocent civilians. These ‘rebels’ are the creation of the West – recruited, trained, armed and financed by the US, Israel, Saudi and their allies.

Colonel Cassad published a series of pictures that expose the US lies about Assad and his chemical weapons, showing clearly that it is the ‘rebels’ who have been making and using such weapons, evidence that the MSM will never show you.

Here is the Colonel Cassad article, with both the original Russian and machine-translated-to-English text, but the images speak for themselves:

A video from a Syrian army-occupied laboratory for the production of artisanal chemical weapons samples that were used for provocation in East Gut.The laboratory was in territory controlled by the “moderate” militant group “Jays al-Islam”.

Translation:

In the West, of course, they do not care about such facts, because only Assad and Russia could use the chemical weapons a priori.

“The secretary [Jens Stoltenberg] stressed the importance of NATO’s unity to oppose Russia, which poses a threat not only to the UK but also to our bloc allies,” the press service of the British Foreign Ministry told NATO Secretary General at a meeting with foreign ministers On the situation with the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. In support of London, French Foreign Minister Le Drian and German Zigmar Gabriel also spoke. They called for counteraction to Russian “disinformation” and “interference” in the affairs of Ukraine and the Western Balkans, and also using Moscow “chemical weapons everywhere, which is evident from the support of the assassin-Assad regime.”

As mentioned earlier, from the point of view of the logic of the Cold War, the facts here are completely irrelevant. The political conditionality of certain statements and actions is more important. And the fact that the militants had a laboratory for the production of artisanal samples of weapons of mass destruction, then this is someone who needs a laboratory.

“Human trafficking—the commercial sexual exploitation of American children and women, via the Internet, strip clubs, escort services, or street prostitution—is on its way to becoming one of the worst crimes in the U.S.,” said prosecutor Krishna Patel.

In order to avoid detection (in some cases aided and abetted by the police) and cater to male buyers’ demand for sex with different women, pimps and the gangs and crime syndicates they work for have turned sex trafficking into a highly mobile enterprise, with trafficked girls, boys and women constantly being moved from city to city, state to state, and country to country.

For instance, the Baltimore-Washington area, referred to as The Circuit, with its I-95 corridor dotted with rest stops, bus stations and truck stops, is a hub for the sex trade.

The average age of those being trafficked is 13. Yet as the head of a group that combats trafficking pointed out, “Let’s think about what average means. That means there are children younger than 13. That means 8-, 9-, 10-year-olds.“

“For every 10 women rescued, there are 50 to 100 more women who are brought in by the traffickers. Unfortunately, they’re not 18- or 20-year-olds anymore,” noted a 25-year-old victim of trafficking. “They’re minors as young as 13 who are being trafficked. They’re little girls.”

Where did this appetite for young girls come from?

Look around you.

Young girls have been sexualized for years now in music videos, on billboards, in television ads, and in clothing stores. Marketers have created a demand for young flesh and a ready supply of over-sexualized children.

“All it takes is one look at [certain social media] photos of teens to see examples—if they aren’t imitating porn they’ve actually seen, they’re imitating the porn-inspired images and poses they’ve absorbed elsewhere,” writes Jessica Bennett for Newsweek. “Latex, corsets and stripper heels, once the fashion of porn stars, have made their way into middle and high school.”

“In a market that sells high heels for babies and thongs for tweens, it doesn’t take a genius to see that sex, if not porn, has invaded our lives,” concludes Bennett. “Whether we welcome it or not, television brings it into our living rooms and the Web brings it into our bedrooms. According to a 2007 study from the University of Alberta, as many as 90 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls aged 13 to 14 have accessed sexually explicit content at least once.”

In other words, the culture is grooming these young people to be preyed upon by sexual predators. And then we wonder why our young women are being preyed on, trafficked and abused?

Rarely do these girls enter into prostitution voluntarily. Many start out as runaways or throwaways, only to be snatched up by pimps or larger sex rings. Others, persuaded to meet up with a stranger after interacting online through one of the many social networking sites, find themselves quickly initiated into their new lives as sex slaves.

Debbie, a straight-A student who belonged to a close-knit Air Force family living in Phoenix, Ariz., is an example of this trading of flesh. Debbie was 15 when she was snatched from her driveway by an acquaintance-friend. Forced into a car, Debbie was bound and taken to an unknown location, held at gunpoint and raped by multiple men. She was then crammed into a small dog kennel and forced to eat dog biscuits. Debbie’s captors advertised her services on Craigslist. Those who responded were often married with children, and the money that Debbie “earned” for sex was given to her kidnappers. The gang raping continued. After searching the apartment where Debbie was held captive, police finally found Debbie stuffed in a drawer under a bed. Her harrowing ordeal lasted for 40 days.

With a growing demand for sexual slavery and an endless supply of girls and women who can be targeted for abduction, this is not a problem that’s going away anytime soon.

For those trafficked, it’s a nightmare from beginning to end.

Those being sold for sex have an average life expectancy of seven years, and those years are a living nightmare of endless rape, forced drugging, humiliation, degradation, threats, disease, pregnancies, abortions, miscarriages, torture, pain, and always the constant fear of being killed or, worse, having those you love hurt or killed.

Peter Landesman paints the full horrors of life for those victims of the sex trade in his New York Times article “The Girls Next Door”:

Andrea told me that she and the other children she was held with were frequently beaten to keep them off-balance and obedient. Sometimes they were videotaped while being forced to have sex with adults or one another. Often, she said, she was asked to play roles: the therapist patient or the obedient daughter. Her cell of sex traffickers offered three age ranges of sex partners–toddler to age 4, 5 to 12 and teens–as well as what she called a “damage group.” “In the damage group, they can hit you or do anything they want to,” she explained. “Though sex always hurts when you are little, so it’s always violent, everything was much more painful once you were placed in the damage group.”

What Andrea described next shows just how depraved some portions of American society have become. “They’d get you hungry then to train you” to have oral sex. “They put honey on a man. For the littlest kids, you had to learn not to gag. And they would push things in you so you would open up better. We learned responses. Like if they wanted us to be sultry or sexy or scared. Most of them wanted you scared. When I got older, I’d teach the younger kids how to float away so things didn’t hurt.”

Immigration and customs enforcement agents at the Cyber Crimes Center in Fairfax, Va., report that when it comes to sex, the appetites of many Americans have now changed. What was once considered abnormal is now the norm. These agents are tracking a clear spike in the demand for harder-core pornography on the Internet. As one agent noted, “We’ve become desensitized by the soft stuff; now we need a harder and harder hit.”

This trend is reflected by the treatment many of the girls receive at the hands of the drug traffickers and the men who purchase them. Peter Landesman interviewed Rosario, a Mexican woman who had been trafficked to New York and held captive for a number of years. She said: “In America, we had ‘special jobs.’ Oral sex, anal sex, often with many men. Sex is now more adventurous, harder.”

Holly Austin Smith was abducted when she was 14 years old, raped, and then forced to prostitute herself. Her pimp, when brought to trial, was only made to serve a year in prison.

Barbara Amaya was repeatedly sold between traffickers, abused, shot, stabbed, raped, kidnapped, trafficked, beaten, and jailed all before she was 18 years old. “I had a quota that I was supposed to fill every night. And if I didn’t have that amount of money, I would get beat, thrown down the stairs. He beat me once with wire coat hangers, the kind you hang up clothes, he straightened it out and my whole back was bleeding.”

As David McSwane recounts in a chilling piece for the Herald-Tribune: “In Oakland Park, an industrial Fort Lauderdale suburb, federal agents in 2011 encountered a brothel operated by a married couple. Inside ‘The Boom Boom Room,’ as it was known, customers paid a fee and were given a condom and a timer and left alone with one of the brothel’s eight teenagers, children as young as 13. A 16-year-old foster child testified that he acted as security, while a 17-year-old girl told a federal judge she was forced to have sex with as many as 20 men a night.”

One particular sex trafficking ring catered specifically to migrant workers employed seasonally on farms throughout the southeastern states, especially the Carolinas and Georgia, although it’s a flourishing business in every state in the country. Traffickers transport the women from farm to farm, where migrant workers would line up outside shacks, as many as 30 at a time, to have sex with them before they were transported to yet another farm where the process would begin all over again.

This growing evil is, for all intents and purposes, out in the open.

Trafficked women and children are advertised on the internet, transported on the interstate, and bought and sold in swanky hotels.

Educate yourselves and your children about this growing menace in our communities.

Stop feeding the monster: Sex trafficking is part of a larger continuum in America that runs the gamut from homelessness, poverty, and self-esteem issues to sexualized television, the glorification of a pimp/ho culture—what is often referred to as the pornification of America—and a billion dollar sex industry built on the back of pornography, music, entertainment, etc.

Call on your city councils, elected officials and police departments to make the battle against sex trafficking a top priority, more so even than the so-called war on terror and drugs and the militarization of law enforcement.

Stop prosecuting adults for victimless “crimes” such as growing lettuce in their front yard and focus on putting away the pimps and buyers who victimize these young women.

Finally, the police need to do a better job of training, identifying and responding to these issues; communities and social services need to do a better job of protecting runaways, who are the primary targets of traffickers; legislators need to pass legislation aimed at prosecuting traffickers and “johns,” the buyers who drive the demand for sex slaves; and hotels need to stop enabling these traffickers, by providing them with rooms and cover for their dirty deeds.

That so many women and children continue to be victimized, brutalized and treated like human cargo is due to three things: one, a consumer demand that is increasingly lucrative for everyone involved—except the victims; two, a level of corruption so invasive on both a local and international scale that there is little hope of working through established channels for change; and three, an eerie silence from individuals who fail to speak out against such atrocities.

But the truth is that we are all guilty of contributing to this human suffering. The traffickers are guilty. The consumers are guilty. The corrupt law enforcement officials are guilty. The women’s groups who do nothing are guilty. The foreign peacekeepers and aid workers who contribute to the demand for sex slaves are guilty. Most of all, every individual who does not raise a hue and cry over the atrocities being committed against women and children in almost every nation around the globe—including the United States—is guilty.

The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 led to the outbreak of World War I. The Gulf of Tonkin incidents on August 2 and August 4, 1964 enabled what we call the Vietnam War

This carefully research article by Professor Graeme McQueen presents a timely historical viewpoint which is routinely “censored” by the mainstream media as well by the search engines. The danger of World War III is not front-page news.

Kindly consider forwarding it Professor McQueen’s article to your friends and colleagues, crosspost it on alternative media and blog sites.

The threat of World War III is real, yet there is no anti-war movement in sight. In the US, Canada and the EU, the peace movement is defunct, ignorant of the broader implications of nuclear war.

This is why, dear readers, we call upon your support and endorsement. There is a real “conspiracy” to trigger war. That’s the truth. Establish community networks, spread the word, organize at the grassroots level.

In the words of Prof. McQueen:

“Our task is clear. We must mobilize both our investigative resources and our communication resources to nullify the efforts of those who specialize in the construction and encouragement of war triggers and who wish to keep the war system robust. We lost over 100 million people to war in the 20th century. Are we really going to let this happen again?”

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research Editor, March 18, 2018

***

As we watch Western governments testing their opponents – today Iran, the next day the DPRK, and then Russia and China – we hold our breaths. We are waiting with a sense of dread for the occurrence of a catalytic event that will initiate war. Now is the time to reflect on such catalytic events, to understand them, to prepare for them.

The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand on June 28, 1914 in Sarajevo led to the outbreak of World War I. The Gulf of Tonkin incidents on August 2 and August 4, 1964 enabled what we call the Vietnam War.

Both events were war triggers. A “war trigger”, as I am using the term, is an event that facilitates an outbreak or expansion of hot war–that phase of the war system in which active killing takes place.

War triggers can lead affected populations to cast aside their critical faculties and their willingness to dissent from government narratives. They can also disable moral values and ideological commitments. At the outbreak of World War I the peace movement, the women’s movement and the socialist movement were all shattered.

While there is debate among scholars today about the extent of the frenzy in Europe as World War I began, it is difficult to dismiss sophisticated eyewitnesses such as Rosa Luxemburg (image on the right), who referred to what she saw as:

What Luxemburg described was a subjective state produced by a successful war trigger, in which a population becomes extremely lethal as it readies itself to rush at its foe while simultaneously battering anyone in its own ranks that dares to dissent.

Luxemburg herself dared to dissent. This led to two and a half years in a German prison cell. During this time she wrote the Junius Pamphlet, criticizing Europe’s socialist leaders for having been captured by the spirit of war, and pointing to the consequences of their folly:

“the cannon fodder that was loaded upon the trains in August and September is rotting on the battlefields of Belgium and the Vosges…Cities are turned into shambles, whole countries into deserts, villages into cemeteries, whole nations into beggars, churches into stables; popular rights, treaties, alliances, the holiest words and the highest authorities have been torn into scraps”. (Luxemburg, 261-2)

Luxemburg’s anger had a solid basis in what has become known as “the August madness” that struck Europe. For example, on August 3, 1914, when the war had just begun, the following call went out to university students from the most senior officials in the Bavarian universities:

“Students! The muses are silent. The issue is battle, the battle forced on us for German culture, which is threatened by the barbarians from the East, and for German values, which the enemy in the West envies us. And so the furor teutonicus bursts into flame once again. The enthusiasm of the wars of liberation flares, and the holy war begins”. (Keegan, 358)

In response to this hysterical appeal, the German university students volunteered in large numbers. Untrained, they were thrown into battle. In the space of three weeks 36,000 of them were killed.

Germany was not unique, of course, in its vulnerability. Randolph Bourne, in an unfinished essay generally known as “War is the Health of the State”, described what he saw somewhat later in the United States as that country flipped from anti-war to pro-war and joined in the global disaster. He observed that once the executive branch had made the decision to go to war the entire population suddenly changed its mind. “The moment war is declared… the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves.”

Therefore, the people, “with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction.”

It is true that war madness of the kind that accompanied WWI has been less common in the years since then, partly because that war turned out to be an unprecedented catastrophe. But I believe it is entirely wrong to think that in today’s era of high technology and digitalized war the arousing of the spirit of war in a population is no longer sought or needed. A highly influential analysis of American Vietnam War strategy, carried out by one Col. Harry Summers, concluded some years ago that a chief cause of the US downfall was the failure of leaders to arouse their population’s emotions. The American people, said Summers, had been forced to fight that war “in cold blood”, which they found intolerable. In fact, this failure to arouse the war spirit was taken by many US analysts to have led to the “Vietnam syndrome” – a reluctance to intervene in the affairs of other countries militarily. This was a timidity unsuitable, they felt, for an imperial power.

One of the purposes of the September 11, 2001 operation, in my view, was precisely to change that situation – to arouse intense feelings of unity, aggression and support for government in order to banish once and for all the Vietnam Syndrome and to launch with great energy the new global conflict formation (the “War on Terror”) so that the 21st century, with the military leading the way, would become another American Century.

Still, war triggers are not all the same, and we need to create categories. We can distinguish three broad types: accidental war triggers, managed war triggers and manufactured war triggers.

An accidental war trigger is an event that triggers hot war in the absence of intention. The pressure of events, random clashes, the everyday quest to satisfy physical needs – all these may, in the absence of warlike intent, produce a war trigger. After the event occurs it may lead, again without conscious plotting, directly to a hot and violent conflict between contending parties.

No doubt many war triggers throughout history fit the category of accidental war trigger. However, the more I have studied recent human wars the less ready I have become to promote the triggering events as accidental.

Years ago when I gave talks on war triggers I used to give the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand as an example of an accidental war trigger. True, I understood that the assassin of the Archduke did not act alone: Gavrilo Princip, the young Serbian nationalist, was certainly not a “lone wolf”; he was one of several armed men stationed along the route of the Archduke’s carriage, and although he was committed to this plan it is also pretty clear that he was deliberately used by a group with high-level connections to carry out the assassination. But I felt that the planners were unlikely to have sought the large-scale conflagration they ended up getting, and I was impressed by the variety of elements in the “Balkan cauldron” that seemed to defy rational planning. Likewise, I was impressed by the numerous systemic factors operative in the wake of this event that led to a major war, ranging from a flourishing arms industry, through genuinely deluded ruling classes and entangling state alliances, to systems such as railways that gave an advantage to the first party to mobilize. All in all, I felt that non-deliberate factors outweighed deliberate factors, so I called this an accidental war trigger.

Recent reading, however, has made me less confident of this position. Especially since encountering Docherty and McGregor’s book, Hidden History: the Secret Origins of the First World War, I am inclined to reclassify the World War I war trigger as a managed trigger.

A managed war trigger is one in which a party of influence consciously acts to increase the chances of hot war, either by deliberately creating conditions where a war trigger is likely to arise, or by seizing an event after the fact and shaping it into a war trigger.

If World War I’s war trigger must be moved from accidental to managed, this increases the number of cases in this already well-stuffed category. The Pearl Harbor attack that caused the US entry into World War II was certainly managed. The factors that would increase the chances of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, thereby overcoming the US population’s resistance to entering this war, were studied and made part of a deliberate program. The Japanese advance on Pearl Harbor was consciously allowed to proceed. The declaration of war on Japan was the immediate fruit of this managed attack.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident also falls into this category. This was no accidental dustup in the Gulf of Tonkin. US leaders had created a systematic program of naval raids on the coast of North Vietnam (the DESOTO raids) intended to stimulate responses. While there is still debate about the degree to which this incident was planned, I am on the side of those who see it as highly deliberate provocation by US leaders, constructed and used to create hot war. The North Vietnamese response to the intrusion of the Maddox and the Turner Joy was remarkably mild, but it was magnified and distorted by US Cold Warriors so that it could be portrayed as “communist aggression” that required violent response.

The success of these last two managed war triggers can be seen in the record of voting in the US Congress. On December 8, 1941 there was only one vote in Congress against the declaration of war on Japan. On August 7, 1964 the House voted unanimously in favour of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, while in the Senate the vote was 88-2.

These voting statistics are sobering. The readiness of the group mind to revert to a pre-rational state—to take aggressive action with dire consequences without seeking any serious confirmation of the facts of the matter—puts humanity in a state of profound risk.

A manufactured war trigger carries the manipulation of populations even further. Here, deliberateness is extreme: it is not simply a matter of increasing the chances that this or that incident will occur, or making a mountain out of a molehill after the event. Here, those desirous of war write the script, choreograph the action, plan the output, and carry out, or subcontract, the actual event. Typically, they will also prepare to demonize and marginalize anyone who dares to challenge the narrative they present to the world.

The War on Terror is a master class in manufactured and managed war triggers. My own studies have concentrated on the two-part operation of the fall of 2001 – the September 11 airplane incidents and the immediately following anthrax letter attacks. These were manufactured war triggers, and they were successful in winning the support of both the US population and its representatives for foreign wars and restrictions on domestic civil rights.

A Washington Post-ABC poll initiated on the evening of 9/11 reportedly found that:

“nearly nine in 10 people supported taking military action against the groups or nations responsible for yesterday’s attacks even if it led to war. Two in three were willing to surrender ‘some of the liberties we have in this country’ to crack down on terrorism”. (MacQueen, 36)

Meanwhile, on September 11 cowed members of Congress fled for their lives on receiving information that a plane was headed toward the Capitol. That evening they assembled on the Capitol steps to sing God Bless America and to begin what was, in effect, their complete capitulation to those who had manufactured this war trigger.

On September 14, 2001 the Authorization for Use of Military Force was passed with a vote of 98-0 in the Senate and 422-1 in the House.

By late October members of Congress had begun to recover somewhat, and the USA Patriot Act, restricting domestic civil rights, met more opposition in the House than had the rush to war, passing by a vote of 357-66. Its fate in Senate, however, was more typical of such cases: 98 to 1.

These outcomes in Congress demonstrate the remarkable success, in the short term, of the manufactured war triggers of the fall of 2001. The effects of such operations, however, are temporary, so the perpetrators have had no choice but to continue managing and manufacturing war triggers to maintain the fraudulent War on Terror. The FBI (and parallel federal police agencies in other Western countries) busily entrap and recruit young people as fodder for the War on Terror, while in other cases False Flag attacks are carried out using wholesale invention. These initiatives have had a mixed success. For example, the official account of the Boston Marathon bombing is widely accepted despite its contradictions and absurdities; but the story of the Syrian chemical weapons attack of 2013 failed to accomplish its apparent aim of greatly expanded direct US military involvement in Syria. Likewise, sceptics of the recent claim of Russian “novichok” use in the UK are already vocal.

We would do well to remember that the on-going production of managed and manufactured war triggers takes great resources and cannot forever remain leak-proof. It carries serious risks for war planners. The successful and definitive exposure of even one of these frauds before the people of the world could affect the balance of power overnight.

Our task is clear. We must mobilize both our investigative resources and our communication resources to nullify the efforts of those who specialize in the construction and encouragement of war triggers and who wish to keep the war system robust. We lost over 100 million people to war in the 20th century. Are we really going to let this happen again?

*

Graeme MacQueen is a former Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster University, a member of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, and a past co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies.

Professor McQueen is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Sources

The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis in the German Social Democracy, in Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1970.

John Keegan, A History of Warfare. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993.

Randolph Bourne, “The State (‘War is the Health of the State’)”, 1918.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker had a moment of clarity once. He famously said, “When things get serious, you have to lie.”

Given the state of affairs in his beloved European Union right now Mr. Juncker and company are doing a lot of lying.

It is rare in politics to get that kind of honesty from a politician, especially one currently in office. But, Juncker’s statement shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who is even a semi-serious political observer.

It’s why I find it funny that the Democrats and Antifa-Left get so bent out of shape when Donald Trump exaggerates or outright lies. To him it’s a tactic. Catching Donald Trump in a falsehood is like trying to ladle water with a sieve.

So, by the Juncker Maxim, things must be getting very serious because the amount and type of lies being thrown around by people who are supposed to know better have been staggering.

To the point that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said, “I simply don’t have any normal terms left to describe all this.”

Lavrov has been the world’s most effective diplomat over the past few years, effectively talking to and cutting deals with people who should hate him and Russia’s policies. What it highlights is that Lavrov and his boss, Vladimir Putin, have been effective simply because they make a deal and keep to it.

They are the opposite of Mr. Juncker. When things get serious they become honest, speaking with one voice.

Part of that comes from having a single administration in power for the past 17 years. It’s easy to keep to agreements when those in power don’t change. The U.S.’s diplomatic history with North Korea, for example, highlights the problems of shifting domestic political winds in Washington.

But, that part stems from the way these men comport themselves on international stage.

So, watching the hyperventilations of of Theresa “Gypsum Lady” May and her Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson over the poisoning of Former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia means there is a lot more going on here than anyone cares to admit.

The quick reversals from European leaders as well as Donald Trump from their initial skepticism of May and Johnson’s bloviating tells me that not only are they lying but they are being forced to lie by some vaguely unseen hand.

Just Blame Putin-stan!

It’s not just that the Neocons are losing, like I talked about in my last article. It is that stench of desperation that’s everywhere right now.

The level of histrionics, lying and insanity over Former Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s firing is telling. From McCabe himself, to his disgraced former boss, James Comey, the level of mendacity, chutzpah and, frankly, evil on display is impressive.

I guess the situation’s been serious for a long time for the lies to come this easily to their tongues.

This week we had the staged walk-outs by high school students over the Parkland, Fl shooting calling for gun control. How desperate are those clinging to power behind the scenes that they’ve turned to weaponizing mal-educated children to do their bidding?

But it mentions reports of chlorine gas attacks, again neglecting to say anything about the Syrian Army liberating a major chemical weapons facility in their advances against US-backed proxies.

How bad is the situation behind the scenes in the financial markets that Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd “Doin’ God’s Work” Blankfein suddenly decides it’s time to step down? Derivative book that bad, Lloyd?

Or did you bet that Gary Cohn would get Trump to heel to allow Goldman to finish destroying Europe?

Long-established diplomatic norms and rules of conduct are simply thrown out the window because they need to be to induce hysteria to take people to war, otherwise, a war-weary, anxiety-ridden population will turn on their own governments.

So, Theresa May tells Russia to prove to her they’re innocent to distract from her betrayals on Brexit.

This is a joke, Right?

Boris Johnson threatens Putin directly and the moron in charge of Britain’s defense department screeches for the Russians to ‘shut up and go away.’ Presumably he said it from his safe space rubbing his safety pin like Captain Queeg.

Meanwhile Mr. Juncker continues to lie about everything as it pertains to Brexit negotiations because the EU’s financial situation must be that serious. If it weren’t they wouldn’t be trying to shake the U.K. down for tens of billions of euros.

Why So Serious?!

Look around you, step back from the craziness and see the bigger picture. When you do you just see a bunch of incompetent, venal people covering their asses. While a lot of what I write here could be considered ‘conspiratorial’ I would disagree.

In fact, I rarely, if ever, chalk up to conspiracy that which incompetence explains far better. As a root cause analyst, I prefer Occam’s Razor to Alex Jones.

Yes, there are groups of people with power conspiring to achieve personal and societal goals which are anathema to life and decency.

But, that doesn’t mean that because they have power they are competent at wielding it. In fact, power makes you lazy. Winning makes you complacent and, eventually, stupid.

Does anyone with any shred of self-respect believe that thirteen Russian trolls armed with Tweetium could derail Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign? Really?

When the more obvious answer is that Hillary and her backers thought they had perfected the art of rigging an election and never conceived of losing. It never crossed their minds until a few days before the election and internal polling forced Obama to campaign in Michigan on her behalf.

And he only did that to help himself, since he was in up to his neck in all of her dirty laundry.

The Theory of the All-Powerful Putin is a childish and nonsensical as the Alt-Right’s blaming Jews for everything.

The Gypsum Lady is trying to save her government by invoking it now. So is Nikki Haley at the U.N., Mika Brzezinski at MSNBC, George Soros and David Brock, the leadership at CNN, Google, Facebook and Twitter. The bigger the lies get, the more desperate you know they are.

All of the Obama administration traitors — Samantha Power, James Brennan, Susan Rice, Robert Mueller, Comey, McCabe, Eric Holder, etc. — lie every time they open their mouths. It their narrative fails it means the end of not only their careers, but the plans of the incompetent globalist oligarchs who fund and power them.

Cooler Heads or Heads in a Cooler?

While I’m not sanguine about how all of this plays out, I refuse to give into hysteria and add to the cacophony. It serves no purpose.

The markets still believe, as they always do, that ‘cooler heads will prevail.’ But, markets aren’t allowed to believe anything else. The central banks ensure that. The sheer size of the money at stake makes it nearly impossible to move much of it without inducing even more panic.

So, the default position of most money managers is sit tight and hope.

But, hope is not a plan or a path to the stars. It is, as I’ve said before, the worst thing in the world — that which you have when you have nothing else. But, changes are coming, war or the collapse of the post-WWII institutional order or both.

As I’ve pointed out, banks are getting nervous, emerging market central banks are positioned for radical currency defense. Rates are rising and dollar liquidity is falling. Bitcoin and gold are screaming this. If there was ever a time to get to cash it’s now.

The acceleration of events since Putin’s speech on March 1st is itself accelerating. Windows are closing fast. It’s time to get serious.

This is a red-pill for those willing to listen. Nothing most of us awake don’t already know but for those just beginning to wake up? It behooves us to know THE TRUTH no matter how unbelievably ugly it is.

Like this:

“They found that binge drinking was most common among adults aged 18 to 34, but more than half of all binge drinks consumed were from adults ages 35 years and older. In other words, older drinkers don’t binge drink as often, but they tend to really hit the bottle when they do.”

Americans are no strangers to boozing it up, according to a new study that found that one in six US adults are binge drinkers. Alcohol enthusiasts in the US are chugging a collective 17.5 billion “binge drinks” per year.

The study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, found that 37.4 million Americans, or one out of every six adults, binge drink about once a week. They drink an average of about seven drinks per binge, meaning they chug a collective 17.5 billion drinks each year. That boils down to about 470 binge drinks, per binge drinker, annually.

“This study shows that binge drinkers are consuming a huge number of drinks per year, greatly increasing their chances of harming themselves and others,” study co-author Robert Brewer, lead researcher in the CDC’s alcohol program, said in a statement.

The results came after Brewer and his team examined CDC data from the center’s 2015 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS). The team used the data to calculate annual estimates of binge drinking, which is defined as men drinking five or more drinks over the course of two hours, or women drinking four or more drinks over the same period. A single drink is defined as a shot of hard liquor, a five-ounce glass of wine, or a 12-ounce glass of beer at five percent alcohol.

Once the team examined the data, they divided the findings by age, sex, education, race/ethnicity, household income, and state. They found that binge drinking was most common among adults aged 18 to 34, but more than half of all binge drinks consumed were from adults ages 35 years and older. In other words, older drinkers don’t binge drink as often, but they tend to really hit the bottle when they do.

When males and females were compared side-by-side, it was revealed that men are much more likely to be binge drinkers. In fact, four out of five binge drinks were found to be consumed by males. Income also played a role, as the researchers found that people with lower household incomes (less than $25,000 annually) and lower educational levels (less than high school) “consumed substantially more” than those with higher salaries and education levels.

Comparing the race of binge drinkers, the researchers found the biggest drinkers were non-Hispanic whites (19.2 percent) and American Indians/Alaska Natives (17.9 percent). Most binge drinkers were located in Arkansas, Mississippi, Kentucky, and Hawaii. Meanwhile, Washington DC, New Jersey, New York, and Washington had the fewest numbers of binge drinkers.

The results demonstrate there is a need to focus on the prevention of excessive drinking, according to Brewer. “The findings also show the importance of taking a comprehensive approach to prevent binge drinking, focusing on reducing both the number of times people binge drink and the amount they drink when they binge,” he said.

It is worth noting that America’s binge drinking is likely worse than the study implies, as the BRFSS relies on self-reported data from a phone survey, and study respondents are thought to underreport their drinking habits. The CDC study, which was published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on Friday,was based on a survey from 2015 that asked around 400,00 Americans over the age of 18 about their alcohol consumption “in the past 30 days.”

Binge drinking is responsible for more than half of the 88,000 alcohol-attributable deaths in the US each year, according to the CDC. It is also the cause of 75 percent of the $249 billion in economic costs associated with excessive drinking in the US.

“We need to ask the hard questions that the corporate media fails to ask.”

We need to ask the hard questions that the corporate media fails to ask: who owns America, and who has the political power?(Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr/cc)

How often does the corporate media cover skyrocketing inequality, crippling poverty, and the pernicious influence of corporate cash on the American political system?

“We need to raise political consciousness in America and help us move forward with a progressive agenda that meets the needs of our working families.”
—Sen. Bernie Sanders“Almost never,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argues in an op-ed for the Guardian published on Friday, just days ahead of his planned inequality town hall that will be streamed online Monday.

The very fact that Sanders—along with his fellow Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and filmmaker Michael Moore—is hosting the town hall in partnership with organizations like NowThis and The Young Turks rather than one of America’s major television networks is itself a testament to the Vermont senator’s contention that “corporate media has failed to let the American people fully understand the economic forces shaping their lives.”

But while “the corporate media ignores the rise of oligarchy,” Sanders insists that “the rest of us” have a responsibility to keep these issues at the center of American political discourse.

“We need to ask the hard questions that the corporate media fails to ask: who owns America, and who has the political power? Why, in the richest country in the history of the world are so many Americans living in poverty? What are the forces that have caused the American middle class, once the envy of the world, to decline precipitously?” Sanders writes. “We need to hear from struggling Americans whose stories are rarely told in newspapers or television.”

Just years ago, in-depth discussions of inequality and its corrosive effects on the democratic process were confined to the political fringes.

But the Occupy Wall Street Movement and Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign forced a discussion of inequality onto the national stage, and helped reveal that a massive swath of the U.S. is eager to push back against the outsize influence of the Koch Brothers, big banks, and fossil fuel companies on policy decisions that impact the lives of millions of Americans.

In his Guardian op-ed, Sanders argues that the only way to combat the systemic inequities that have resulted in the largest income disparities since the 1920s is to continue raising “political consciousness,” without the help of corporate media outlets that fail to give these crises the attention they deserve.

“The rapid rise of oligarchy and wealth and income inequality is the great moral, economic, and political issue of our time,” Sanders concludes. “We need to raise political consciousness in America and help us move forward with a progressive agenda that meets the needs of our working families. It’s up to us all to join the conversation—it’s just the beginning.”